follow

follow is a common feature (and often UI button) in silo UIs (like Twitter) that adds updates from that profile (typically a person) to the stream shown in an integrated reader, and sometimes creates a follow post either in the follower's stream ("… followed …" or "… is following …") thus visible to their followers, and/or in the notifications of the user being followed ("… followed you").

The biggest difference between following and friending is that to follow does not require an agreement between both parties where as friending does. Following is an asymmetrical relationship, where as friending is symmetrical.

Another key difference is that friending typically implies many more permissions between the parties, e.g. in Facebook the ability to write posts on each others's "walls".

Indieweb examples

rhiaro

Amy Guy displays follows posts since 2015-04-27, see list at [1] (but they also show up mixed in with other post feeds). Marked up with u-x-follow-of on the URL of the person/site followed, for now.

Chris Aldrich

Chris Aldrich has begun to actively create follow posts on 2/16/18. He keeps a list at [2]. They're tentatively marked up with either p- or u-follow-of. He also maintains a following page at [3] which has associated OPML feeds for use in subscribing in readers as described at the bottom of that page. Some of his follow posts also have SubToMe buttons which allow visitors to relatively easily also follow those same pages/feeds--see for example: [4].

Past examples

Ben Roberts

Ben Roberts had a follow post created on 2015-05-11, marked up with u-follow-of on the URL of the following. E.g.:

Subsequently broken during software changes and removed as this was the ONLY follow post created ever

Service Examples

Feedly

Feedly uses the terminology "source" in the interface. You can add a new source to follow, and the prompt asks to "search by title, URL, or #topic".

Entering a search term will return feeds that match the term. It is not obvious what is being searched, whether it is limited to blogs already being followed by someone, or if there is some other database being searched.

If you enter a full feed URL, such as the JSON Feed URL below, that exact match will be the first result.

After the search result is returned, there is a "follow" button next to each, as well as some additional information about the feed. The following information is displayed if available:

The number of subscribers (unclear on how this is determined, presumably the number of Feedly users who are also subscribed)

An approximation of the frequency of new articles, given as a number of articles per week

The name of the feed

A description of the feed

The name of the latest post in the feed

A list of hashtags associated with the feed (unclear on where this list comes from, since it's not from the feed itself)

An icon for the feed, or a placeholder with the first letter of the name of the feed

Clicking on the feed name will pop open a modal dialog with a preview of the items in the feed.

Clicking on the "follow" button will open a menu to select which of your "feeds" you want to add this source to.

FeedHQ

FeedHQ allows you to give a name to a feed, and you can choose which category it should appear under in the reader interface. FeedHQ requires that you enter the full feed URL when subscribing. If the feed URL is valid, you will be subscribed immediately.

If you enter a URL that is not a recognized feed format, it shows an error after submitting.

Silo examples

(stub section - please help expand!)

Facebook

"When you add someone as a friend, you automatically follow that person, and they automatically follow you. This means you may see each other's posts in News Feed. When you follow someone who you're not friends with, you'll see posts that they've shared publicly in your News Feed." - Facebook help.

As a result, you can follow people you're not friends with who have allowed this in their privacy settings, and you can unfollow people you are friends with, so their content doesn't appear in your timeline, without unfriending them.

(needs screenshot of Facebook "Follow" and "Friend" button/menu-item(s) on Facebook itself, preferably in both logged in and logged out variants)

Facebook periodically shows new friend connections in the main feed, and so far as I can tell up-to-the-minute new friend information in the right sidebar.

(needs screenshot)

It also has 'suggested follows/friends' (link/page/screenshot?) and the ability to suggest a friend to someone.

(needs screenshot)

Issues:

Algorithmic filtering - you likely will not see all the posts of everyone you are following (note the "you may see each other's posts" - may not will). Facebook has an algorithm they use to show you only posts that they think you'll want to see from those you are following.

Brainstorming

Follow posts

Amy Guy: As the community is currently small, I'm interested in seeing when people I follow follow someone new, in case I want to follow them as well. This might not work so well if I was following hundreds of people (silos curate this information for you for a reason..).

I'd potentially be more interested in choosing whose follows I see myself (eg. by subscribing to a specific 'follows' feed by someone).

I'm not sure about posts for unfollows. Broadcasting unfollows could be rude/offensive/upsetting but if you unfollow someone for a specific reason (they are abusive, hostile, boring) it might be useful for me to know you've done this (and why).

I'm definitely interested in keeping track of when I follow/unfollow people and creating follow/unfollow posts with published dates seems like a good way to do this. Could also add a note about why I (un)followed them (lots of people I follow on Twitter are consistently interesting but I can't remember when/how I found them).

If I follow someone then unfollow them later, I don't necessarily want the fact I ever followed them in the first place to be lost to the ether.

Follow notifications

Every silo gives you the option to be notified when someone follows you. Is anyone sending/expecting webmentions for this?

Could this be done as:

someone visits {site A}

{site A} has "follow" button ( potentially with local meaning, so for the currently visited resource, like a page, a tag collection page, etc. )

clicking on the follow button leads to indieauth

site B authenticates

{site A} detects webmention endpoint on {site B}

{site A} registers {site B} to be webmentioned an update occurs on that resource to the resouce

webmention should probably include an additional field, so it would be like

Following vs subscribing

Following can be considered synonymous with subscribing, for example via a reader to consume content from a website or feed. This makes sense on platforms where each person has only one feed (eg. Twitter). However it's worth noting that one person or site can have multiple feeds (different types of content, different topics etc) so it might be useful to differentiate between following a person and subscribing to a feed.

Ongoing Follow

Performing a follow action on all platforms is a one time action done by clicking a button or entering your email address in a field and then clicking a button.

Temporary Follow

There is the idea of a temporary follow, which is like a normal follow, but a temporary follow automatically expires after a certain amount of time or other condition is met.

Blog comments on the WordPress platform have a rough implementation of this idea. Once one leaves a comment "follows" a thread, the WordPress platform asks "Would you like be notified of additions to this conversation?" upon selecting yes, the user is notified of follow up discussion. Aside from WordPress the only app that seems to be doing something in respect to cross platform notifications of updates to conversations is [5]

Some examples where this could be really useful are:

Notify people involved in a previous conversation X about new post Y that relates to X "Orignal poster has

Temporarily follow everyone at an event for duration of the event, then expire a week after event is complete

The first example starts to border on the territory of notifications in providing simple UI feedback to a user!

Follow button

(this may deserve its own page at some point, especially to distinguish in-silo follow buttons from cross-site follow button webactions)

"Follow" buttons are a popular and reasonably well understood convention in various service UIs (screenshots needed in examples above), thus it makes sense to develop an indieweb equivalent (beyond the existing "Subscribe" links/buttons).

Follow bookmarklet

With an indie reader you can potentially follow any site. woodwind already has a subscribe endpoint that works with a URL, so a bookmarklet is easily made:

SubToMe

Start with experimenting with SubToMe to learn and understand how that works, before designing a generic "Follow" button or webaction (markup, indie-config handler etc.)

Follow Webaction

It may make sense to also wrap an indie Follow button by using a Follow webaction, around service specific Follow button(s) from silos like Twitter and Facebook, both of which have "Follow" button markup you can add/deploy on your own website

As a webaction, you don't necessarily want to subscribe to the page you are on - for example twitter supports follow on any user in the visible thread - the indie equivalent to this would be adding follow buttons to author urls in replies, comments and other webmention presentations.

Silo Examples

Twitter

Twitter has a follow button that you can place on your own website and thus acts as a Twitter-specific follow webaction.

Following as Feedback

On several silos follower counts are seen as important feedback on one’s work as well as a way of showing potential employers and advertisers that people like the content you are putting out there. The number of subscribers on YouTube is one such metric.

This means following out-of-band, e.g. through the use of feed readers, is taking away important feedback from content creators.

(question: some feed readers identify subscriber numbers while fetching feeds. how common and reliable is this? (only useful for feedback to publisher obviously, not as social signal to others) – sknebel)

Martijn van der Ven makes sure to subscribe to YouTube channels on the site and uses YouTube’s OPML exporter to keep his feed reader in sync with subscriptions.

Peter Molnar is switching from stalking RSS feeds to following people within silos - photographers on Flickr, 500px, etc, for example, so they get feedback on the number of their followers. This was always a problem with RSS (or any similar feed), even though services like Feedburner and embedded analytics (both JS and via tracking images) were trying to mitigate it, they never really worked well.

The article "The Follower Factory" in the New York Times 2018-01-27 has a cautionary tale about bot following factories that could inform the value of following as feedback. How can we build to prevent this type of gaming so that the feedback has some actual value?